1. Who runs/ran fileball.net?2. Why is the front-end down but the FTP still up? How does that help save bandwidth? Small HTML files no longer in use vs. multiple-megabyte files that are still up for download?3. Was Simplic7y started as a replacement for fileball?4. Why is the FTP so slow? I am getting 15KB/s, just to quantify "slow", but perhaps you already know that, because the rate seems consistently capped at that level.5. Is anything happening with the Arkives? Does anyone care anymore? I read about the DVDs being distributed, but that thread doesn't really tell me anything except that it indicates that no one who got a DVD was going to host the material, except for a mention of a mirror someone set up (this?).

Claude Errera, The Battle Cat, and Frigidman all ran fileball.net. I believe Fm paid for the bandwidth and designed the website itself.

The website, back when it functioned properly, was slow and had a clumsy and counter-intuitive interface for people looking to upload files. Notoriously slow speeds and an unnecessary moderation system for file uploads meant that you could wait upwards of a week before your files were finally posted.

Eventually Fm got frustrated that his bandwidth costs were so high (which is a joke in and of itself -- the monthly transfers weren't that high, he was just getting screwed), but according to him the site would have been too difficult to just pick up and move to another server, so he nixed the site altogether. The FTP exists just as an archive of the existing files, and presumably the monthly transfer rate is lower because the majority of active mappers, as far as I know, use Simplici7y instead.

Fileball.net's hosting service was horrible, and apparently it still is, judging by the crappy speeds.

Yes, S7 was started to replace Fileball, and to address some of the aforementioned frustrating aspects of FB's interface. For the most part, I would argue that S7 is a successful enough replacement; though it has its own fair share of interface problems, from a mapper's perspective I find S7 to be a much friendlier site -- not to mention I don't have to wait so damn long for my files to be posted. (It was really annoying if you just wanted a minor update to your file; not only did you have to wait for the update to be uploaded, but in the meantime the existing file was also taken down!)

RyokoTK wrote:Those should all be on the Fileball FTP, though I don't believe the files are ordered by date.

As far as I remember (I joined the community in '04) there aren't a whole hell of a lot of netmaps since '05 that aren't on Simplici7y by now.

OK, thanks. I'm not looking for anything in particular and, now that you mention it, I suppose everything really is on S7. RS and Coriolis were the only packs played when I started.

There were some random packs by...um....Wet Noodle or Imac...that I really liked too. I am also one of the few who liked Glass to the Arson but I guess no one went out of their way to preserve that one.

Every time a discussion about fileball comes up, I make a request that some of the lucky few who were sent DVDs (which include the database dump not available on fileball FTP) make them available for the rest of us to mirror via bittorrent, but they never do, greedy souls.

Heh, I was wondering why there are multiple copies of the same files, in different versions. Seemed an odd thing to do.

Re BitTorrent, wouldn't it still be preferable to that to have a more easily-accessible site where you can pick what you want, down to the map/pack, and just d/l it, and at a decent speed (torrenting would be for lumps of maps/files, I assume)? Or is there not enough interest to make it worthwhile?

RyokoTK wrote:I'm sure you can find Suicide Run and Glass to the Arson on the Fileball FTP.

It turns out that in their infinite kindness, you were never able to delete your old files. You could "hide" them, but now they're all visible again.

Thanks. I found both packs. Suicide run is not the pack I was thinking of, but I recall that one of the maps was called the Dudeson's Playground. I didn't like that map but there were others in the pack. Does that ring a bell?

I'm looking forward to hosting Old School Hollywood soon in honor of Mordekai and DopeBoyMagic.

So, it seems like it's not worth putting up on a devoted site or anything, right? Is it worth putting the older netmaps/mods on S7? Or do you guys definitely think that setting up torrents is the best choice? If someone were to do that, what would be the best way to group the files? One torrent for each main folder of the Arkives, i.e., aleph1, emr, evil, infinity, etc.? Some folders are a lot bigger than others, but maybe that's unimportant.

Maybe I wasn't clear the first time. The people who have the files will not make them available to the rest of us by torrent, and will not set up a site. So further discussion of this is kind of pointless.

Last edited by treellama on Oct 30th '08, 21:25, edited 1 time in total.

It's not pointless if someone else had scraped all the files off the server and was trying to gauge interest in how to make them more easily available to others (at a decent download rate). It's not pointless if they are willing to upload a few gigs of data for torrents, or if they happen to have dozens of gigs of free space that they don't need for themselves, with a high-quality host. But certainly if hardly anyone sees a benefit in doing so, that person wouldn't want to make the offer, because they'd want to know that it would be worth the trouble before putting themselves out there as someone who could do that. Try to read between the lines a little bit more in the future, Tl.

Iritscen wrote:It's not pointless if someone else had scraped all the files off the server and was trying to gauge interest in how to make them more easily available to others (at a decent download rate). It's not pointless if they are willing to upload a few gigs of data for torrents, or if they happen to have dozens of gigs of free space that they don't need for themselves, with a high-quality host. But certainly if hardly anyone sees a benefit in doing so, that person wouldn't want to make the offer, because they'd want to know that it would be worth the trouble before putting themselves out there as someone who could do that.

Someone has already done this, and it is indeed pointless, just another copy of the FTP. What we want are the database files too.

Treellama wrote:Every time a discussion about fileball comes up, I make a request that some of the lucky few who were sent DVDs [...] make them available for the rest of us to mirror via bittorrent, but they never do, greedy souls.

Iritscen wrote:My lacking the database needn't be a roadblock at all, that can be obtained from someone with the DVD. I just want to hear from others here as to whether they care about seeing fileball resurrected.